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Geneviève, from the cover of The Vampire Genevieve. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Been on a bit of vampire kick, and so I completed reading Anno Dracula by Kim Newman. A pretty enjoyable book. I really liked Geneviève Dieudonné, once again, because I could see a reflection of one of my own characters in her. It sort surprised me that Geneviève began life (ha!) as a Warhammer characters, which is almost… almost at odds with this novels replete literary call backs.

I’ll not summarize the story, as the wiki link handles the job well enough. However a question arose when I had completed reading this book. What do authors think of… um., “borrowing” characters from other writer’s works and using them within their own canon? Nearly every figure within the pages of Anno Dracula started out as another authors creation. What do you all think of that? There were a few moments when I near expected Dr. Helen Magnus to walk into the room to take charge of matters, which might be a symptom of the genre, alternate history/steampunk and in a way a compliment to it.

There was, I’ll admit a point in time when I almost used Ruritania, in place of Saxe-Coburg in my own work, as I wanted to drive home the point that the world I had created was not “our world” but an alternate Earth with different nations upon it. Oh and it’s in the public domain, but an author friend persuaded me not to.